Chase Twichell's Poem 'Blurry Cow'

It is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and it is sunny. I can feel the heat of the sun warming my back. My energetic little Pomeranian is bouncing around the green yard. As soon as the sun hits her black fur, she topples over and exposes her belly, asking for a belly rub. It smells like freshly cut grass and infinity. The tree, standing sturdy above me, flaunts its branches which have the buds of new life. The sky has no clouds, and I can almost imagine that the world has stopped still. The day could not be more perfect. However, the world is constantly moving. Not only does it spin on its axis, it also rotates around the sun. The sun orbits the galaxy. The galaxy moves through the universe. The speed of our galaxy through the universe about 1.3 million

Think about this: if one of a pair of twins is sent out to space at a high speed, her biological clock will slow down, and when she returns to earth, she will have aged less than her twin sister (“Time Dilation”). This type of situation is hypothetical, but it still applies to the poem: people have different expiration times on their biological clocks, but no one knows when this time is until they die. First, in “Blurry Cow,” there are barely any words such as “I”, “we”, or “you” that personalizes the being on the train. Therefore, the observer can represent anyone or anything. Everything is moving in time and space, and eventually, the train will arrive at its destination, objects will be destroyed, and living beings will die. Also, the readers do not know where the train is headed, we only know that the dog is headed “toward a farm yard” (Twichell 12). This adds to the uncertain mood that readers feels when reading the poem, and it also shows that humans are heading into the unknown and do not know what is to come in the time ahead of them. All in all, the distant mood that the readers feel explain the uncertainty of time and human